David Liss - The Ethical Assassin

The Gambler’s eyes narrowed, and his face pinched inward. “You tell me, Lem. You think about it for a while, then you come back and tell me. Right now I’m more interested in what you did. So you left? Were they doing anything when you left?”

I felt like I was gaining some ground, so I pushed it further. “Why? What does that have to do with my having lost the sale?”

“Just answer the question, would you?” The Gambler looked away.

“I don’t think so. They were sitting at the kitchen table, smoking, too angry with each other to talk.”

He stared at me blankly. Then I felt the smack of inspiration. Ideally, I would have had more time to think it through to be certain it wasn’t an amazingly stupid idea, but I didn’t have time, and I decided to run with it.

I paused and peered away as if in thought. “Before I went in there, I saw this creepy guy hanging around.”

The Gambler now sat up straight. “What creepy guy?”

I shrugged, as if the story were no big deal. “Just a guy who stopped me, wanted to talk to me. He drove a dark Ford pickup and he had a strange haircut- short all over, but longish in the back. He had weird teeth, too. I think he might also have been the guy who was hanging around in the dark outside the trailer when I left, but I’m not sure. I didn’t see whoever it was lurking around the trailer, but it was just a feeling I had, you know?”

I tried to look more puzzled than pleased with myself. The Gambler and this other guy, Doe, were clearly working together on this- and had been working with Bastard and Karen. Now I had the Gambler suspecting Doe. If I could cook up enough Treasure of the Sierra Madre tension between the two of them, they’d forget all about me and the check that never got written.

“All right,” the Gambler said. “Get out of here.”

I stood up and started to walk toward the door. “I won’t let it happen again,” I chirped like a good little bookman.

The Gambler didn’t even look up. “That’s just fucking great.”

HE’D BEEN DREAMING about the bodies, about moving them, which was why he believed you should never do anything too unpleasant right before going to sleep. It always stuck with you. In his dream, Doe had Karen’s body, thin and light, like a department store mannequin, draped over his shoulder. Next to him, with Bastard in tow, was not the Gambler but Mitch Ossler, that fat bumbler. In the dream, Doe was just waiting for him to drop Bastard. And he would have. He’d have dropped the body and it would have come out of its impromptu bedsheet shroud, and it would have rolled away from them, even though they were on flat ground.

Mitch Ossler was like that. He’d taught the other guys how to cook meth, and he knew his stuff. No doubt about it. Mitch could cook fast, and he could cook reliably. He had his ear to the ground and came up with new recipes. He was the one who found out how to turn crankhead piss back into meth. But Mitch never had a mind for the details, little things like safety and staying alive. No one had been surprised, really surprised, when the accident happened. Something like that was bound to happen, and Mitch was exactly the sort of guy it would happen to. The asshole had been setting up a new lab; he let a batch get too hot, and it vomited out a violent blast of vapor right in his face.

No one else had smelled anything, but Mitch, whose face had gone all red and puffy from the wallop of heat, said it was mustard gas. Invisible, almost odorless, and in about twelve hours his organs would start to rupture. He had to go to a hospital.

Thing was, Doe couldn’t let Mitch go to the hospital, couldn’t let him make up some bullshit story about how he got exposed to mustard gas. It wasn’t exactly like he could have been defending his trench against an offensive by the Germans. So they’d burned down the new lab, and Mitch had been the first guy to end up in the waste lagoon. Too bad, because he knew a lot of useful things.

Doe was up earlier than he would have liked and later than he should have been. He forced himself out of bed and hobbled around his bedroom, moving from closet to dresser and back again, keeping his legs wide apart to ease the pain. He wasn’t going to look at his balls anymore. He’d decided he would just not look. He’d wait a week and then look again, surprise himself by seeing a normal sack. That was much better than checking them every day like some sort of hypochondriac.

No one would have guessed from looking at his trailer, from looking at the stuff in his trailer, that he had a fat and fast-growing account in the Caymans, and that was just how he liked it. Sure, his trailer was a little bit bigger than most of the others in Meadowbrook Grove, a little bit more nicely kept. He had a girl come twice a week to pick up for him, so he didn’t need to bother with crap like laundry and putting away dishes. That’s why most people lived badly. They had to choose between the freedom of laziness and the tyranny of neatness.

Doe knew that a cleaning girl was the third way. In his case, he had a chunky sixteen-year-old with bad acne and droopy eyes. Her mother said she was slightly retarded, and Doe had no problem believing it, the way she hulked around, mumbling cheerfully to herself. But she cleaned with a thoroughness that bordered on obsession, and she didn’t steal or nose around. Even better, he almost never felt the urge to fuck around with her, ugly thing that she was. One time he thought about throwing her down and shoving it right into her asshole, purely on principle, because he could get away with it. Give her a cookie or a lollypop or something, and she’d be all right. But the phone rang or someone knocked on the door, and he was distracted.

First thing that morning, he staggered into the shower, angling himself so the water didn’t hit his balls. He stayed in there for a long time, maybe too long, but finally forced himself out, and after a cursory pass with the towel, he stumbled into loose-fitting jeans and a Tampa Bay Bucs T-shirt. With breakfast in hand, a bag of Doritos and a Pepsi from the fridge, he hit the truck.

Bastard was dead, and that was going to be a problem. Now he had to see to it that there were no other problems. He needed to do the rounds, make sure everything looked normal. Bastard had a family emergency, he might say. He had to take off, visit his dying mother, fuck his dying sister, it didn’t matter. Bastard found out he had colon cancer and had to go off for treatment. That might be good. Serves the fuck-stick right for messing with Karen. He deserved to have the world thinking he had ass cancer.

Meanwhile, Doe would have to get someone else real soon, because if production dried up, there was going to be trouble. Even if Doe understood in principle how to cook, he wasn’t about to risk getting an organ-melting blast of mustard gas. So until they could recruit a new cook, it would be business as usual. A great deal of the distribution went through the encyclopedia kids- those two assholes the Gambler kept close- so that wouldn’t be a problem. Same as always, they’d come to town once a month, go into neighborhoods, pass off to their dealers. Nice and neat. Cops didn’t look at them twice.

They weren’t the problem. The problem was the extracurricular product that the Gambler and B.B. didn’t know about. Things had been growing lately, and Doe had begun to move beyond the cover of bookmen. There were other distributors now, and if they didn’t get what they wanted, they’d whine. If their tweaking crankhead buyers didn’t get what they wanted, they’d do more than whine. They’d make trouble, they’d break into houses and knock off convenience stores and old ladies in the street to get their ten fucking dollars for their fix. They would get themselves arrested, and once these assholes were sitting across the interrogation table from the cops, too stupid to ask for a lawyer, they’d talk.